THE SOUND OF KONG

There are lots of monster movies that I consider favorites, but RKO's original 1933 KING KONG tops them all. I know, there's DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, THE MUMMY and scads of others that are true classics, but none quite compare to the combination of adventure, fantasy and horror that sets this film apart from the rest. While researching material to include in my article on the 90th anniversary of The Eighth Wonder of the World for PREHISTORIC TIMES magazine I came across this article from POPULAR SCIENCE (April 1933) that does a deep-dive on the sound effects for Kong and the various dinosaurs seen in the movie.

Murray Spivak was hired as the sound effects supervisor and his first order of business was creating vocalizations for the "non-human players". He did not want to use anything that people would recognize as typical animal sounds and ended up modifying and mixing known sounds by lowering the pitch or otherwise manipulating them. When completed, he had a completely new sound library of prehistoric "grunts and growls" as he called them.

My article will appear in the summer issue of PREHISTORIC TIMES (#150). I'll give a shout out when it's published.

WANTED FOR VAMPIRISM AND MURDER!

Despite the salacious, modern-period illustration by Charles Copeland that accompanies it, this article by Philip Ledward from MEN magazine August 1958 chronicles the barbarous career of German serial killer Peter Kürten from a century ago. Dubbed "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" and the "Düsseldorf Monster", Kürten was a life-long criminal who committed his first murder when he was 9 years-old.

He went on a notorious killing spree in 1929 where he beat, bludgeoned, stabbed and sometimes drank the blood of his victims who were mostly helpless women. He was eventually apprehended and subsequently beheaded on the guillotine. This all just a few years before another human monster, Hitler, rose to power.

A HELL-HOLE OF LOST SOULS!

Offered today is another nifty batch of sordid exploitation movie posters. We've got Russ Meyer's FASTER PUSSYCAT . . . KILL, KILL! with the fabulous Tura Satana, GIRL ON A CHAIN GANG, with a vertigo-inducing title, a couple of "Mondo" films, the first Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS movie, a couple of Asian exploiters, and . . . well, you get the idea.